The Modern Library (15 page)

The love story between England and India has never been better told than in this discerning novel. In 1923 Olivia, married to an English official, Douglas Rivers, stifles amid the staid social habits of the British in India. Fleeing these gatherings of stultifying boredom, Olivia meets the dissolute but charming Nawab and drops the company of her fellow memsahibs for exotic occasions at the palace, which eventually lead to love, and worse. She abandons her husband – abandons England – for the Nawab, and, fifty years later, her ex-husband’s granddaughter follows her to India to investigate this family scandal. It is the granddaughter who tells the story, and whilst her experiences imitate and are a counterpoint to the earlier love story, they are entirely different too. Jhabvala conveys the daily realities and teeming profusions of modern India, so that Olivia’s story and the days of the Raj and the Nawab seem to settle into the heat and dust of the present as part of a pattern that had to be.

Nothing is stated in this novel which can be implied or imagined; gracefully written, finely constructed, it fascinates both as a love story, and as a sensuous evocation of what the English lost most in India – the soul and feeling those sent out to rule her longed for, yet feared the most.

This novel was published in a box. Inside were twenty-seven sections, of which the first and last sections only were to be read in that position. The others could be read in any order, a daunting proposition, but in fact this random method of following the story is perfectly suited to the tale that unfolds.

The narrator is a football reporter, sent to a Midlands city to cover a match. Because we read the workings of his mind, thinking and remembering with him, it becomes clear that the book could be presented in no other way. For when he gets to the city he realizes that this is where his friend Tony had lived, with his wife, and that he had often visited them in the years before Tony’s tragic death from cancer.

And so the random form of the novel matches the random insecurities of life and death, all the more so because the voice and experience of recollection are both Bryan Johnson’s, and he was so soon to take his own life. There is hunger in this novel, a sense of waste and yearning – for time not to pass and for death not to come. The rugged strength of his writing and the warmth and sensitivity of his vision give B. S. Johnson’s unconventional experiments with the form of the novel real meaning and worth.

Elizabeth Jolley is always a surprise. She belongs to that flourishing tradition of English tragicomediennes which begins with Jane Austen and wanders on through Emily Eden, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge. Like them, her value lies in the absolute originality of her own distinctive voice.

The Sugar Mother
is quintessential Jolley. Edwin Page, a hypochondriacal academic of considerable pomposity, is married to Cecilia, a self-satisfied gynaecologist. Cecilia absconds for a year’s study leave abroad with a cackling sort of woman called Vorwickl (one of Jolley’s great successes is her calm engagement with sexual predilections of a complex kind). Edwin and Cecilia keep in touch: ‘Vorwickl she told him ate a cocoon in the muesli. No he said, Yes she said. She said it was delicious even when she knew it was a cocoon.’ To fill the gap in the useless Page’s life, enter young Leila, and Leila’s insinuating mother, who proceeds to take over his life, his house, his bathroom and his sperm count, producing resolutions which are darkly funny, and unpredictably moving.

Jolley’s lightness of tone and her wry, sidelong style enable her to deceive us into serious considerations. She is the most disconcerting of novelists, flourishing words and witticisms like an extremely benevolent sorceress enticing us to laugh at, and
understand
, loneliness and the longing to love.

James Kelman is at his best when he has a single male character under pressure and in pain: his novels and his short stories, like much of Beckett’s fiction, deal with the workings of the mind, the slow mechanics of thought and memory. He can write brilliant passages of invective and complaint, but these are often
underwritten
by passages about longing and seeking comfort – anything, a cigarette, a drink, some company, love. The tone of his work moves constantly from hardness and brutality to a kind of tenderness.

In his novel
How Late it Was, How Late,
Sammy, our Glaswegian hero, wakes up in a cell after two days’ solid drinking. He has a police record. He has been beaten up and he is in pain. He is also blind. The novel is written in what the American edition calls ‘the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish lower classes’. It catches his consciousness at work as he tries to reconstruct what happened, as he tries to walk and move around, deal with the bureaucracy and the police and the fact that his girlfriend has disappeared. The novel is lighter in tone than most of Kelman’s work, almost funny at times; it is full of his unique genius for exploring a carefully modulated poetic language of the mind.

(US:
Schindler’s List
)

This book is based on interviews conducted by the author with survivors of the Holocaust who were protected by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. None of the book is invented, but it uses the form and tone of a novel. It is a harrowing book which centres in its early chapters on the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, on the beatings and casual murders of Jews, and then on the slow realization that nothing is casual, that all of this is planned.

Schindler, who set about employing and protecting as many Jews as possible while remaining on good terms with the authorities, emerges from the book as enormously sensual, oddly generous, very complex. His urge to save his workers is dramatized sometimes as pure heroism, but also as a strange innocence in his nature. Keneally’s version of Amon Goeth, who runs the camp nearby to which many Jews are taken, is dark and disturbing, but equally convincing. He writes with great skill about how systems were put into place and how they were circumvented and then how they prevailed once more. Although
Schindler’s Ark
is a story about heroism and ultimate survival, about a good man in a dark time, the atmosphere of the book is deeply depressing and savage, and this is, perhaps, as it should be: a small testament to those who perished as much as to those who survived.

This book is written with such calm, lazy ease it reads at times like an exercise in pure style, a way of showing that American prose could continue to shine and glitter and perform tricks just as much as it could when Hemingway and Fitzgerald were at their best. It is a book full of carelessness and youth and the search for sensation. It is a deeply American book, full of hope, open to the infinite possibilities which lie ahead; no European has ever written a book like this.

It is based on a number of trips across America which Kerouac made with Neal Cassady between 1947 and 1950 in which they had a lot of fun with drugs and sex and being broke and making friends; Kerouac is Sal and Cassady is Dean. The narrative is written in a straight line; the material seems not to be shaped or structured, the shape of the book remains true, we are led to believe, to what things were like: unplanned, spontaneous, free and easy,
beautifully
aimless; characters appear and disappear, events happen without meaning, the abiding presence is Walt Whitman rather than Henry James. The spirit of the book took over the lives of young people in half the world in less than ten years.
On the Road
has all the importance of a classic rock album or road movie.

‘God in India doesn’t work. Only fools do,’ says one of Khanna’s post-Partition Hindus. Beginning in one of the camp slums which housed such refugees, this novel is like an Indian movie, rumbustious, vivid, seductive. The wayward Omi is the son of a sweet vendor. In the camp a person who makes buckets in the back garden and sells them in the front is considered an industrialist, but Omi’s father is a modern Indian bent on dragging his family up into life in the capital city by his busybody bootstraps, carting along the recalcitrant Omi.

The chaos of Omi’s adventurous youth is familiar: what is particular about Khanna’s account of Omi’s progress is the hilarity and verve of the demotic Indian English in which Omi’s family and friends communicate. They address the world lavishly in an idiom of curses, salutations and cries to heaven which brings each of the inhabitants of this Punjabi world pugnaciously to life. All of 1950s India is here, with its love for the movies, its marriages, houses of learning, wife-beaters, families at peace and war. Khanna laughs with his chorus of fools, while his sharp eye makes subtler mincemeat of religious differences and useless taboos. But it is in the character of the resilient Omi, and in his relish for language, that the excellence of this novel lies.

Stephen King has produced a splendid cavalcade of popular horror novels; this one is almost like a subterranean autobiography.

Paul Sheldon, a bestselling writer, has driven himself to drink and boredom by creating a series of relentlessly popular romantic novels featuring Misery Chastain, a heroine of mindbending inanity. Killing her in childbirth in his last novel, Sheldon drives off, liberated, determined to write real fiction, and then crashes his car. Unfortunately he is rescued by a number-one fan of Misery, the lumpen Annie Wilkes, who has even named her pig after his heroine. What follows is a masterpiece of horror and black humour. Paul’s legs are smashed: Annie gets him hooked on painkillers, locks him up, torments him and eventually starts slicing off bits of his body, waving a succession of sharp instruments threateningly whenever he shows the slightest sign of not doing what she is forcing him to do: bring back from the dead her heroine Misery Chastain in yet another noxious romantic novel. This Sheldon does, and descriptions of intense physical pain alternate with sections from Sheldon’s new Misery novel – a splendid piece of romantic nonsense – and the Samurai prancings of the psychopath Annie.